Although website migrations are relatively commonplace in the context of re-brands and organizational mergers, I work for a PE-backed company that pursues growth through acquisition as a regular endeavor.
This necessitates constant migrations wherein legacy brand sites are absorbed into our marketing site’s web structure, and in doing so, the legacy site vanishes into nonexistence; leaving only a product page with its namesake and any relevant new or old pages enjoying the residual link equity passed on by redirection behind.
After handling quite a few of these migrations in the last year (including many very-botched migrations that pre-dated me), I’ve come to see my W2’s marketing site as a sort of elder litch, consuming the proverbial souls (pages, content, link equity) of acquired websites to grow its power (web authority) and expand its lifespan (leadflow/revenue growth), well beyond what could/should normally be achieved.
I would not waste a competent SEO’s time explaining how a migration is done, but I did want to flag a few of the non-SEO obstacles, technical and otherwise, that I see regularly (still within the video-game-coded lens of litchdom).
Resistance. Part of the soul tearing you are doing when you retire a website is personal: you may get pushback from the stakeholders who built that site from the ground up. But resistance is futile. The acquisition has already happened. While this might be a temporary roadblock: those who cannot accept what’s next tend not to last very long.
The Pre-Ritual Period. And by this, I mean back-end timelines. They never said consuming a soul would be easy -- and just like a litch needing to perform the necessary rites to absorb a soul, so too does an organization need to handle systems integrations like lead routing updates, and that can be deceptively significant at scale. All the same, without the necessary pre-ritual (non-web) considerations, the out-of-scope preparation that has to occur in advance can be one of the biggest blockers (looking at you, MOpps).
Survivors. Oh those pesky pages nobody wants to let go of. No backlinks or rankings to speak of but ‘definitely used by sales’ for enablement, or ‘definitely have generated leads’ in the past when they were heavily supported by that one email campaign two years ago. Ideally: let useless pages die or cover them with a blanket redirect to the relevant subdirectory. Practically: “Whatever you want m’lord, we’ll make sure those pages get re-created.” Survivors are an annoyance, but outside some minor page bloat won’t negatively impact you. Obey whoever is the liege (boss) of your proverbial realm (org), because if the litch isn’t in cahoots with the greater entity (see: leadership alignment)the kingdoms may collude to diminish its power.
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